Monday, July 12, 2010

Kampala Bombing

The 7/11 bombings in Uganda were a bit of an overreaction to the sport of soccer but that's the hallmark of AQ--don't like it, kill it. That's why we continue to fight. That's why we're still in Afghanistan so crackpots like that cannot run anything.

So it's not surprising that al-Shabab, the Somali-based wing of their big cave brothers, has taken credit for the attack. Even if they didn't do it they still heartily approve, because it's so them.

But should America care? This was Uganda after all, home to the notorious former dictator Idi Amin and famous for almost nothing else.

The only troubling thing seems to be the cross-border nature, if indeed al-Shabab was involved. The US has a decent-sized Somali population and a few were recently arrested for wanting to join the jihad in the horn of Africa, similar to last year. Uganda is an ally and has been providing the bulk of troops to the African Union force trying to keep peace in Mogadishu, with the US providing a bulk of the support for that army. Meanwhile, Ethiopia, Kenya, Burundi have also taken our side in the fight against Somalian Sharia.

Maybe nothing, but the targeted sports bar was 'Ethiopian themed'. Earlier this year an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 exploded after takeoff from Beirut's Harari Airport, blamed initially on weather until the story completely disappeared. No official cause released yet, but a few months ago a captured member of AQ claimed the plane was brought down with an underwear bomb:

News reports from Saudi Arabia say the recently arrested terrorism suspects were part of a network of al-Qaida-affiliated radicals that included two suicide bombing cells.

Mahboub Maalim, head of the six-nation East African regional economic group known as IGAD (Intergovernmental Authority on Development), says al-Qaida-linked terror cells in the Arabian Peninsula are working with like-minded groups in the Horn of Africa.

“We’re almost certain in Somalia the group al-Shabab is not a Somali group any more, and we think a lot of other nationalities are there in the name of that cell, the al-Qaida cell, and definitely we feel there is also a link with the group in Yemen,” note Maalim.

The underbomber himself was from Africa, Nigeria to be exact, and had trained in Yemen. Places like Darfur have not suddenly become Shangli-la since George Werner Bushitler became a private citizen in Dallas just because the media and Hollywood stopped caring; it's still flaring. And the reason has always been the brutal targeting of non-Islamic peoples by the Islamic regime in Khartoum. Funny, they sent Milosevic to the World Court for that kind of stuff. So this most recent event in east Africa just adds to a not very promising common theme.

In other news, the TSA is now asking Congress for more funds to upgrade their bomb-sniffing dog fleet. This has been done before, immediately after a spark caused the explosion of a fuel tank in a 747, a case in which a bomb sniffing dog actually saved the entire narrative without sniffing anything at all. Perhaps a bomb sniffing dog would have found the bomb on Abdulmichlob assuming it wasn't masked by more pungent odors. Meanwhile back in Africa, Kenya was the scene of the last known attempt to bring down a commercial aircraft (El Al). One of the perps in that attack was also likely involved in the Embassy bombings, a thug from the island of Comoros, site of another unsolved airliner crash. Not that it means anything necessarily.

In March, the New York Times reported that the U.S. had become so concerned with the group's activities across Somalia and in Yemen, across the Gulf of Aden, that they were giving direct military support to the TFG. This was strongly denied in Washington.